Music. For people with ears.

Ahhhh Dolores. A bit of jauntiness. Throwaway jauntiness. Some much needed respite from the more downbeat, melancholic stuff around it on the album. It features the first of three guest vocalists Roberta Fidora who, at the time, fronted ace spiky post-punk band Hold Fast. She now fronts ace electro-poppers Curxes (http://www.curxes.com/) and her vocals are still stunning.

This was my attempt at writing a breezy guitar-pop song I suppose. The Stills (RIP) were one of my very favourite bands and the guitar parts especially are indebted to them. The middle noisy bit was pretty Weezer-inspired I guess and it’s probably the most ‘fun’ thing on the album. I mean….it has a stylophone solo. If that’s not fun then I don’t want to know about it. The lyrics are deliberate trash. Rhyming ‘Dolores’ with ‘thesaurus’. I wasn’t going for any Pulitzer Prize here.

Neil who recorded most of the album at The Old Blacksmiths studio did a particularly great job on this song I think as there were bits I wasn’t too sure about at the time of recording. We had a few clashes along the way and he summed it up well by saying if there was ever something on a track we disagreed over, it was whoever shouted the loudest that finally got their way. I got mine a few times and he got his too.

Rich Tamblyn who owned said studio at that point set up the Jelly Maid Music label to release Neil’s old band The Dawn Chorus’ excellent body of work prior to us signing with them. We played an early gig with The DC at the old Havana pub and struck up a firm friendship that has remained in place ever since. In fact, our trajectory of playing our last ever show at The Kings Theatre for this years Southsea Fest literally mirrors their last gasp. Bassmeister Keef was in The DC, I played with them on a couple of tours and Ox & Elliott from TBOTB now play in The Retrospective Soundtrack Players (http://www.therspuk.com/) that came out of The DC’s ashes. Frontman Kyle is an exceptional songwriter. And Southsea is very incestuous musically as you may already know.

Finally – who was Dolores? Well – I had a bearded dragon by that very name. We thought it was a female for the first few years. Turned out to be a male. So Dolores was a trans-gender lizard. There you go.

I was waiting for this one in particular to make a cheeky request… Dolores is one of the few tunes that we’ve not seen you guys play live and, seeing as I love it, I was wondering whether you’d drop it into the set for either Victorious or Southsea?